Implicit Social Biases in People With Autism
Elina Birmingham, Damian Stanley, Remya Nair, Ralph Adolphs
Psychological Science · 2015 · Volume 26 · Issue 11
Abstract
Implicit social biases are ubiquitous and are known to influence social behavior. A core diagnostic criterion of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is abnormal social behavior. We investigated the extent to which individuals with ASD might show a specific attenuation of implicit social biases, using Implicit Association Tests (IATs) involving social (gender, race) and nonsocial (nature, shoes) categories. High-functioning adults with ASD showed intact but reduced IAT effects relative to healthy control participants. We observed no selective attenuation of implicit social (vs. nonsocial) biases in our ASD population. To extend these results, we supplemented our healthy control data with data collected from a large online sample from the general population and explored correlations between autistic traits and IAT effects. We observed no systematic relationship between autistic traits and implicit social biases in our online and control samples. Taken together, these results suggest that implicit social biases, as measured by the IAT, are largely intact in ASD.
Keywords
autism spectrum disorder (ASD), implicit bias, Implicit Association Test (IAT), stereotype, prejudice, open data, open materials
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.